In the production of semiconductor devices, a plurality of chips are usually formed on a common semiconductor wafer which must pass through a plurality of processing steps including the steps of etching, coating, doping, plating, etc., until the desired multilayer configuration is achieved. After many of the steps, it is desirable to clean the wafer in order to remove contaminants and other particles generated during the previous operation in order to prepare the wafer for following operations. As the complexity of semiconductor chips increases, along with an ever decreasing size for the respective components therein, it becomes more and more important for ensuring that the wafers are adequately cleaned and dried between operations to assure the utmost cleanliness and the best possible yield, since any contamination carry-over may significantly affect the quality of the end product and the yield obtainable.
Although all of these factors have been known in the wafer production art, a variety of problems have been encountered in the cleaning and drying of wafers between production steps. Among these problems is the fact that wafers received from a wet processing operation are often stored in a dry environment. It has been found that when contaminants from prior operations are allowed to dry upon the surface of the wafer, they are significantly more difficult to remove during a subsequent cleaning operation than would be the case were the wafers stored in a wet environment before the cleaning operation. Similarly, it has been found that although the cleaning operation may satisfactorily remove the contaminants originally on the wafer surfaces, the wafers are recontaminated before they are removed from the cleaning apparatus, thus defeating much of the cleaning operation.